Stuttering Issues

Alright, here's my problem. I've got a brand new PC. All my programs, games, etc... work wonderfully on it.

I hit my snag with only one program, SL. I get on and it stutters and seems to give me lag. No problem I tell myself. I put my graphics to low, I can handle one program working on low. No deal it's still just as laggy and stuttering. I have a good high speed cable connection.

I assume that SL is not optimized yet to my PCs main components. Or perhaps I'm doing something completely wrong. Any help on the issue would be much appreciated.

My specs are:

- Windows Vista 64bit OS
- Asus P6T Deluxe Motherboard
- 6Gb of RAM
- Core i7 920 2.7Ghz processor
- 2x GTX 280s in SLi

That's the basic of the system. If you need anything else, feel free to ask me, thanks in advance.

Your system is more powerful than 99% of all SL users' machines (by a mile). So the problem is definitely not with your hardware.

I see you're new to the forums (welcome, by the way); are you also new to SL itself? If so, then it's likely you're just not used to how SL performs. Do not expect to get the kinds of frame rates out of it that you would from games. There are many technical reasons why SL just won't do that.

If you're getting 30 FPS or better in most areas, then you're doing very, very well. If you get 20-ish, you're doing OK. Mid to high teens are not stellar, but are certainly not unusual. low teens and single digits tend to indicate something is wrong.

It's also possible there was a problem with the particular area you tested in. Did you try going to other places? If an area is over-crowded or badly built, or if it contains bad scripts, FPS can be terrible.


To give you an idea of the kinds of frame rates you can expect, here's the result of some reporting SL did: http://s3.amazonaws.com/secondlifegrid.net/frameratesbygpu.png . That was a little over a year ago. Things have obviously changed a little since then, but not by much. As you can see, people with high end video cards at the time were averaging about 25-45 FPS, across the board. An average of, say, 35 could well mean 100+ on empty islands, and single digits in bad areas.

SL is really hard to benchmark, since there are so many chaotic factors in play. That's just par for the course in a user-created world. Anyone, either deliberately or accidentally, can slow a region to a crawl without having to try all that hard.


All that said, one thing you might want to try is disabling SLI. People tend to get mixed results with it in SL. When I enable it on my system (dual 8800 GTX), I get about a 30% boost to FPS, but some people have reported exactly the opposite, a huge slowdown. It seems to vary from machine to machine. I'm not sure why.

Thank you for the quick response Chosen. No, I'm not new to SL, I had another PC I used with SL for a year or so, with a 7800 gtx in it, and it wasn't high fps, but there was no stuttering in the same sims I try with my new PC. Problem is that I do some 'gaming' per say on SL, shooting bows or fighting with swords, and the stuttering really makes it difficult. I thought it could be the scripts on me (weapons, etc...) and the sims I went too. But then I would have had the same problem with my older computer no?

My fps are at a completely steady 12-13, they don't drop, but they don't go any higher either. I was around 25 on the same settings sometimes more with my older PC. I did try running it on a single card and then on SLi, no change in performance from one to the other. I'm quite stumped frankly.

Hmm. I'm stumped as well, I'm sorry to say. With the hardware you listed, it should be screamin'. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

If you do manage to solve the problem, please post. I'd be very curious to know what it was.

I have no idea what the problem might be, but, you might want to try a bunch of different viewers and see if one of them solves your problems and suits you.

Some options would be Cool SL Viewer, a Nicholaz viewer, the LL Release Candidate viewer, the Kirsten viewer, and the Impromptu viewer.

You can find the websites for many non_LL viewers at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers and the LL Release Candidate is the normal LL download site, secondlife.com/downloads .

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "laggy and stuttering". Possibly a more detailed description of the problem might trigger someone's memory of reading or experiencing a similar problem. It's also possible that looking at the stats display that comes up with Control Shift 1 might yield some useful info.

Also, if you haven't searched jira.secondlife.com, you might try that.

Have you looked to see what processes are running? Perhaps you have a continuously running indexing process or something that is tying up your processor or disk.
?

I suppose it's also possible that your newly-installed virus checker is interfering with SL's cache. You might explicity exclude the cache from virus checking - the textures in particular tend to freak malware/virus checkers out.

Well thank you for all the help. By stuttering I mean, it's almost like, it shows a frame and skips one, it's only a minor inconvenience, but with 13 fps it's quite annoying.

I'm able to live with it for now. My processes are not clogged up. I run one program at the time and don't have any background programs running. It's not impossible to be in world, hence, I don't really want to start messing around with anti-virus and new viewers. I'll sit back, live through it and hope as SL updates come, it'll fix it somehow. Call me lazy, haha.

Anyhow, thank you again everyone.